Hello! Fancy seeing you here. We thought a little update might be in order…

Last time we posted we’d just released our first game Doppler and were basking in the glory of wild success… Alright, not glory (or success), but we’re still really proud of the game – we got some really positive feedback (thanks Mum!) and even a mention on two game of the year lists!

Still, our plans of early retirement have had to be delayed a little, so we had to do some work… we’ve been working on several client contracts the past few months. The results of some of that should be available soon, we’ll let you know! We’ve also got a couple more exciting projects starting to shape up.

We’ve also been beavering away getting Doppler ready to release on Windows Phone. We got a shiny new Lumia (really nice phone) and converted the project with relatively little pain. Unity is really good like that!

What’s more, this new version is FREE! All the same modes and features but no need to reach for the credit card. Ok, it is ad supported, but its quite restrained and hopefully wont damage the experience for anyone. We’re really hoping that going free will help us get more eyes on the game and help it gain a bit of traction on the store. Plus, if you find you’d rather just see Doppler as nature intended, there’s an option to pay to get rid of those pesky popups!

How much is this, you ask? Twitchy fingers hovering near your bank cards… Only £0.79 ($0.99) for full, unlimited ad-free goodness! Plus, to match this new lower price point, we’re reducing the price of the iOS and Android versions to stay inline!

We’re making good progress now! Doppler finally has all the features in and now we’re working on tidying, polishing and just generally making everything ready for the release.

What are the final features? Well, we’ve mentioned Leaderboards and achievements before, the new bit is the three gameplay modes:

Infinite
The game takes you through 5 stages of increasing speed and challenges the player to survive as long as they can. Making mistakes costs you charge and you can earn this back by playing well and filling a boost bar.

ExtremeThis mode strips things back, no levelling and no charge. It’s fast from the start and hitting the line or letting go here is an instant game over.

Time AttackHere we have 12 unique tracks that increase in difficulty. Mistakes cost you speed. Can you earn the three stars for each track?

Doppler has had its first press! A beta review from the folks over at Within the Game. We’re very excited that they enjoyed it! Here’s a quote….

Dopplerhas the addictiveness mobile games thrive upon down perfectly – once you lose, it immediately restarts the game with no loading time, just straight back in, a challenge flung straight at the player. Can you beat what you just did? Was that round not quite as good as you know you can do? Want to try again? Right there in front of you is the start. Resist it if you can.

Head over there to give that a proper read! We’ll also most likely be stealing their tagline – “Bringing the wire loop game up to date” – for our future marketing! Thanks guys!

In other news:

We’re currently testing out a different leaderboard system that will allow us to access more score information, so instead of just displaying your best score in the game we can let you know immediately when you overtake a friend!

Another mode is in testing – Race Mode changes the focus a little and allows the player to control their own speed. We’re not yet sure on the specifics but it will allow us to generate a different kind of competition in the game!

We’ve been working away on our game Doppler since announcing and made some good progress since the first update! Not least giving it the name Doppler! We went through reams and reams of names before we found one we like, we’ll probably post about that at some point in the future.

The last week has been spent in two areas… tweaking the setup of the core gameplay to keep more consistency in the difficulty between play through and giving it an awesome makeover! The first bit was needed to make sure the game felt fair every time you lost. Essentially it needed to feel like you did it wrong, not the game! The second was mostly just to give us something prettier to look at when we’re working!

If you head over to our new game page you can get the latest information about the game and see the latest shots and trailer! Here is a sample, just for fun!

Title Screen

The next job is play-testing more features and modes to see what makes the cut for the release. We’ve got loads of ideas and we’ll go into more details on them soon!

Our first actual announcement! Well, sort of, we’ve been working on something for a few weeks while we wrangle some contracts and it’s started to come together into something we think is quite interesting!

What is it?

The Line (a better name is on our to-do list!) is an action game for mobiles. Inspired by one of those old wire loop games you might have played. We didn’t want to simply take that and copy it though, we just took the idea of not touching this line and tried to build something fast and exciting. We’re going for that ‘just one more go’ feeling you get from games like Super Hexagon.

How does it work?

Place a finger on either side of the line to create a connection to it. Then simply avoid it! Touching, letting go or breaking the connection makes you lose charge. Holding close can build it back up.

The game rapidly increases the difficulty through set levels and only absolute concentration will see the player get a top score. This gets pretty frantic!

We’re still working on the look and deciding the final feature set, once that’s done we’ll make a dedicated page and trailer. For now, here are some screens:

So, it’s a been a few months since the last one of these, and they’ve mostly been pretty busy! I’ve managed to fit in some games though, pretty much all on the PS Vita. I love that thing!

Most played game over the last few months then?

OlliOlli, 2D platformer skateboarding! One of those easy to pick up, painfully, frustratingly, Vita throwingly hard to master games that really takes over your free time!

First up it quickly teaches you the basic control set before setting you free into the main game: simple taps and gestures for launching a trick, landing, spinning and grinding. Your job is to thread as many of these together as you can to get the most points. These commands really are simple but its amazing how much your brain (well, my brain at least) can’t be relied on to get it right. It’s d-pad to grind and x to land, Brain, sort it out! Even this wouldn’t be too hard except that most of the points you earn over a set of tricks rely on you getting a perfect landing – is a quick tap with a split second timing requirement. So an amazing bit of thumb dexterity over a set of tricks and grinds can all amount to next to nothing with a mistimed press. It gets tense!

Great fun to play and the short levels make it perfect for little bursts of play on the Vita at any time. Get it!

Wow, its April. Where has the time gone?! I mean, we lost an hour the other day, but unless I’ve missed something I don’t think that’s been happening a lot?!

So, since last time, what’s been going on? We’ve been busy again, spending most of our time developing a game for our client Vasco Games. The game is a lane strategy game called Pesky Humans, check it out on our portfolio page!

It’s doing well so far, sitting somewhere between 5-10K downloads at the moment. If you want to help us push it over 10K, it’s available on Google Play, and it’s FREE (ad and IAP supported)!

Other than that, we’ve also continued to work with our friends RatDog Games on their upcoming title Drykkur, more details on that here.

We’ve also written some more blog stuff which we’ll be putting up over the next few weeks, the first one probably being a bumper What We’ve Played post!

I said this would happen, so I thought I’d better do at least one post! Thought it would be nice to share some of what we’re playing when we’re not making games. Which, to be honest, isn’t a lot of the time! I’ll will try and do this every couple of weeks though.

This last couple of weeks has seen a new favourite game for us… Teslagrad! Rain Games’ new magnetism powered platformer. The initial draw of this one is the lovely art and animation style; it’s the finely tuned mechanics that keep you interested though. Playing as a small boy escaping capture in an oppressive city you find items granting Teslamancer powers. The first of these is a pair of gloves that allow you to make certain objects magnetic and change their polarity. This leads to lots of well devised puzzle sections, especially later as you gain more powers and use them in combination. It’s always tricky enough to test you without becoming frustrating. The boss battles deserve a mention too, each one an interesting test of the players ability to use their powers in different ways.

On the whole, definitely well worth a look!

Aaaaand, judging by the Unity logo as it starts up, Teslagrad is created in the free version of Unity! Which is just another hint that Unity is an absolutely amazing tool for creating games in every genre and style. You just have to to bring your imagination.